What Is RescueTime?

RescueTime is a time management &amp; Productivity software firm founded in 2008. The RescueTime program runs in the background of your devices measuring, tracking and categorizing your activity.

RescueTime is a free program with a premium update That allows features and more reporting like moment input that is offline signal. It delivers a reporting dash with your data chopped, diced and sorted into useful graphs that will assist you manage your time.

The app is based on Peter Drucker’s (the famous Management advisor ) maxim that”what gets measured, gets managed.”

RescueTime takes the monitoring of time And makes it painless and automatic you truly track your time so that — you can be conscious of time usage.

Nevertheless, there are dozens and dozens of Improvement &amp; time management programs online. What are the pros &amp; cons of RescueTime? Here’s what I’ve noticed through time.

Disclosure — I get referral fees Mentioned on this site. Any info or remarks are based on my experience as a client or adviser to a customer. Gameplay Time Tracker

Rescuing Your Period

To reiterate, RescumeTime is a productivity tool at the Sense that it helps you enhance your time-management skills. It collects data about the programs and sites you use, then generates reports based on that info.

You set up a and create an account to Begin Desktop app in your computer(s) and optionally a mobile program on Android apparatus ) There is no iOS program because the operating system prevents RescueTime from collecting the information it needs to carry out its purpose. Those apps quietly and invisibly monitor which apps you use and which sites you visit, in addition to the amount of time you spend on these.

The hard nut to crack is the Way to make sense of all that information. To get the best results, you have to customize your accounts from the RescueTime website and inform the program more about what you believe productive versus unproductive activity. The further you fine-tune it to your particular circumstances, the greater your results. As an instance, someone who operates in the finances industry might classify reading financial news on sites such as MarketWatch and FT.com as a productivity task, whereas for me, that’s an unproductive use of time.

You can categorize each app and website on a 5-point Scale of very effective, effective, neutral, unproductive, and incredibly unproductive. You can even categorize activity into perform categorizes. For instance, I record Google Docs as quite productive, and I categorized it as Writing, which will be a subcategory of Layout and Composition. Looking at Redfin.com is quite distracting when I am trying to work, and I have categorized it as such.

From the desktop app, there is a simple set of controls That lets you pause RescueTime for a quarter hour, one hour, or until tomorrow, providing you easy access to shifting the program off for days or breaks once you wrap up early.

Privacy

When confronted with RescueTime’s proposition–We’ll monitor Everything you do and provide you insights about your habits! –some individuals might, justifiably, worry about their privacy and the safety of information on their own hardware. If you work with sensitive info on the internet or keep sensitive information on your own computers and mobile devices, you are going to want to read RescueTime’s privacy and safety statements closely.

For everyone RescueTime’s privacy policy Includes a summary on top, only a couple of stiff lines which are worth reading.

If your concerns are somewhat more relaxed and You Just Don’t Want RescueTime tracking you on the weekend, so you’ve got control over the days and times the app monitors your behavior. It is simple to set it to only watch your action from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, or whatever program suits you.

Reports

I’ve used RescueTime for decades, and that I don’t check my Productivity reports. I like to let the service run in the background so that when I really do want to find a better picture of how I’ve been spending my time, a good quantity of information is awaiting me.

When I do go through the reports, however, they’re Magnificent. I really like the variety, giving you get multiple ways of understanding your productivity and customs, from bar charts and pie charts that reveal lump sums of activity, to line items of applications you used.

One simple but powerful piece of advice RescueTime Provides is an investigation of when during the day you tend to be the most productive. I wasn’t surprised to see that my brain peaks in the morning and slacks off after 2:00 p.m., as that matches pretty well with what I understand about my habits. If you have never analyzed your productivity, however, that may be a beneficial revelation for you, one that might help you schedule your days more productively.

The longer you use RescueTime Premium, the more applicable the Data becomes, because you may view your statistics by day, week, month, or year. And as you might expect, you can toggle that days and times RescueTime records your action so that it works automatically on weekends, for example. Gameplay Time Tracker

Additional Capabilities

Much of the value you get from RescueTime comes in what You make of the information and the way you use that information to influence your own behavior. Changing behaviour is hard, but getting rich insights does not have to be.

One of those manners RescueTime makes it easy to understand how To interpret all the data it collects is with a Productivity Pulse score. This daily evaluation, shown as a percentage, comes from calculating the percent of time spent very productive, effective, neutral, unproductive, and very unproductive tasks. To be clear, no one is advocating you aim for a 100 percent Productivity Pulse score.

A RescueTime blog article explaining the productivity Score notes that the score is 67 percent, and the average is 79 percent. The majority of people need to do some job which isn’t considered”very productive” during daily. The entire point of using RescueTime will be to help you figure out how to focus on productive and incredibly productive tasks if you will need to and possibly save less productive activities for times when your ability to focus has been waning anyway.

Less productive jobs are not the same thing as distractions. RescueTime has a simple and smart attribute for curbing behaviour that is unwanted, such as getting sucked into websites , too. A feature named FocusTime, when empowered, blocks your ability to access. It personalization and takes a little setting up, but it’s quite effective after it’s ready to set up. As an example, let us say you want to to finish a report, and to make progress on it, you need to concentrate hardcore for at least the next 30 minutes. Switch FocusTime, and it may prevent you from looking at email, posting on Twitter, checking sports scores, or other sites and actions you deem distracting.

The RescueTime mobile app has a setting which will Silence your phone whenever you empower FocusTime. Likewise, you may set up other automation with the support of third-party providers IFTTTFree in iTunes Store and Zapier to block or silence additional distractions. By way of instance, you can make a rule with IFTTT (it stands for”if this, then that”) that says,”If I empower FocusTime, then automatically set my Slack status to busy.”

RescueTime also gives you the option Idle time. Any time RescueTime notices the computer was idle for many minutes at a row, so it pops up a dialog asking if you’re in a meeting, on the telephone, taking break, and so on, and permits you to classify the idle time accordingly.

Advantages of RescueTime

Here is some of the advantages of utilizing RescueTime Over solutions. Gameplay Time Tracker

Feature Set

At its heart, RescueTime does one thing — monitor time. When you look at it like this, it’s not unique. Technically, you could do some of those dozens of apps that are free or that with a spreadsheet on the internet.

But RescueTime’s attribute set is unique due to The way that it tracks time and what it does with all the information (aka, one you’ll actually use).

Since RescueTime’s tracking feature simplifies that Problem, you will have data that is complete, correct & useful.

RescueTime’s other features focus on producing their Core feature. Like time-tracking &amp; charging for 15, they do not try to add. They don’t attempt to enter any side companies.

They do have Attribute in an interesting way. For example, the Get Focused! From running when chosen feature blocks programs.

They have alerts and goals that Permit You to pick What you want to happen when X happens — and RescueTime can do this based on which it is monitoring.

I love how RescueTime does Offline Time Tracking. Rather than being required to search and add it 100% manually, then you pick a time interval that is unlogged and fill in the blank.

You can customize the buttons to create logging Offline time quick and simple.

It is a feature but that Making it great. It’s simple, simple and well-done.

Pricing and Strategies

RescueTime offers two tiers of service: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 per month or $72 per year). Businesses or organizations that are looking to utilize RescueTime across a bunch of individuals pay the exact same rate.

RescueTime Lite offers Tracked her or his period before. The program monitors which sites and programs you use, and also how much time spent in or on every one of these. You may categorize each program and site you use on a Productive/Unproductive scale, also RescueTime generates a few basic reports showing the best way to spend your time. Lite members can set weekly objectives, such as”spend X hours per week on productive tasks and fewer than Y minutes on unproductive products.” You can get a weekly report email. For reports, you’re limited to some history, however.

Subscribers get everything from the Lite plan that is free, Plus extra features and reports, such as an unlimited history. Premium comes with alerts you can enable for if you reach on goals. You can more correctly log time spent away from the computer, noting whether you were in a meeting, on a phone call, or just out to lunch. There is a Get Focused option, which lets you block deflecting websites for a period of time you place. Gameplay Time Tracker

Comparing RescueTime’s cost to that of other programs Requires an open mind as apps do precisely what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one and it charges a flat fee of $40.

We could, but look at traditional time-tracking Apps for freelancers that typically include tools for invoices. HarvestFree in Harvest is a example. At $12 per person per month for Premium, it costs more than RescueTime, but it’s a very clear return on investment because it helps to ensure more accurate charging. How you will translate RescueTime’s reports and make better use of your time as a consequence is much less clear.

Toggl, another Classic app that’s Popular among salespeople, prices $9 per month, and it also gives you tools for tracking time spent on projects with the usual end aim of charging customers. It has integration options for linking with other invoicing services, although toggl does not contain its own invoicing tools.

A few programs are nearer to RescueTime in what they have to Provide, such as Slife, even though they tend to have fewer features even if they’re free (and Slife is).

Either way — RescueTime is a no-brainer pricing-wise. It’s free to use.

And when you are saved by the reporting/advanced features just One hour per month then it’s paid for itself even if you are earning US minimum wage.

RescueTime is an investment which makes sense.

Program Quality

A problem with monitoring apps of all types is That they have to be on. The”always on” feature can cause performance issues on laptops &amp; desktop computers. Battery issues can be caused by it on mobile devices.

But in my experience, RescueTime causes neither. It is running from startup on my Windows PC my Macbook Pro, and also my Nexus 5x mobile phone. I have never monitored any battery life or performance issues to the program.

It’s well-built and lightweight.

I enjoy the fact that the cellular app does not demand Heaps of absurd permissions. It requires access to usage data, but doesn’t try to monitor emails, contacts, location, or any of the privacy that is normal violating programs that are permissions request.

It is quick to set up and syncs using an online dashboard. It pulls in data from all sources and crunches the data quickly if you are on the Premium program or by next day on the free plan.

Reporting

What is the purpose of information if you can not interpret it ? Gameplay Time Tracker

RescueTime’s reports solves this problem — and in Lots of ways is the whole purpose of using the program over a spreadsheet.

RescueTime’s Dashboard uses bar and Pie charts to show just what you are (and are not) doing.

You can Choose to receive reports every day, Week or even month.

And on Top of That, you can dig into the Reporting with numerous filters and overlays to find out your customs.

It to see that the amount of Time that each task takes.

When I trying to find a marketing agency in Atlanta — The time tracked to Instant Messages and Gchats was astounding. It altered processes not only for me personally, but also my project supervisors.

Now I’m on my own with no fulltime employees — I can see the precise time I devote to tasks that matter. I am able to construct around those.

And Simply to reiterate Built-in into the computer software. The Dashboard is on my default — and innovative reports are pre-built.

It’s all effective, seamless and fast so that you While analyzing your time Are not ironically currently wasting time.

Integrations

One of the Major selling points of RescueTime is their feature set minimalism. They do one thing and they do it nicely.

That said people using their merchandise Have time-based software requirements. When it’s project management, charging, staff time tracking or anything else — your time needs don’t stop with tracking, measuring and categorization.

To resolve that Issue, RescueTime’s software Integrates with a huge assortment. They’ve guide integrations and an open API with applications that is common.

Whether you are a freelancer attempting to integrate Time tracking into invoicing applications like FreshBooks or a project manager that needs to collate team member’s time, RescueTime will integrate with it.

Cons of RescueTime

Like any applications RescueTime is Nor is it the best fit for everyone. Here’s some disadvantages that I’ve noticed over time. Gameplay Time Tracker

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

If you do the wrong thing for 18 hours per day, Daily with perfect focus — you are doing the wrong thing.

The most important Element in time direction is to Work on the things — the center 20% of time input that will generate 80% of your results.

And that. RescueTime Can not fix that problem.

In certain ways, Actually, RescueTime can damage your Attempts by pushing you towards improved doing over strategy, research and planning.

If effectiveness is the core issue RescueTime isn’t for you. It’ll only make things worse.

I’d recommend reading some of them books.

Conclusion

RescueTime continues to be an invaluable tool for me personally. It is not for everybody and has pitfalls and some attribute quirks.

Nevertheless, the thing is perspective. It’s easy to think that you just”work a ton” or are”not addicted to your telephone” or”spend as much time writing” or are”hardly ever on Facebook.”

But the information does not lie. And using RescueTime to Get accurate time data onto your digital time can assist your own time is literally rescued by you and place your own life in perspective. Gameplay Time Tracker